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He nudged his thigh between her legs, pushing it up and under the stretchy dress, and moved his knee with gentle but demanding pressure so that waves of sudden pleasure made her gasp aloud. No one had touched her since him. She hadn’t even been able to conceive of letting anyone near her. Having him touch her now electrified her body and her eyelids fluttered.
“You’re hot for me.” Angelo was holding on to his self-control by a thread. “I can feel it... I can hear it...”
“Angelo, please.”
“Please what? Please bring me to orgasm? Or maybe please put your mouth where your knee is? Because I know how much you like that, Rosie, just like I know how sensitive your nipples are, how one lick of my tongue can almost make you come.”
He reluctantly removed his legs where a damp patch at the knee was proof of how turned on she was by him, despite the fact that she had mouthed all the right words and made all the right objections.
He knelt down next to her so that they were eye-level. Rosie was still breathing quickly, panting almost. She wriggled up into a sitting position and pulled her dress back down because it had been pushed up over her hips. Her hands were shaking. She could barely think straight. She felt shell-shocked.
“I have yet to tell you my proposition,” he murmured and tilted her face to his when she would have looked away.
“I know what it is, Angelo. We fall into bed like a couple of horny teenagers who are too stupid to think through the consequences.”
“You want to go into catering? I will set you up with your first big job. In Cornwall. I know everybody who’s anybody down there and the rest would jump at a chance to nose around the manor. You won’t need to invest in any equipment. I’ll even throw in a small car. You can pay me back when you start making money or if the cottage is sold.” He shrugged. “Or you can not pay me back at all. It’s immaterial...”
Rosie blinked. Never had such soothingly spoken words carried such dangerous intent. She was listening to him propose a pact with the devil. Her mouth parted and she made an inarticulate, strangled sound under her breath.
“I know. Thrilling, isn’t it? Just when you thought your ship had sunk.”
“I can’t believe I’m hearing this.”
“Don’t bother trying to work a maidenly exit, Rosie. You’ll never be able to pull it off. I’m offering you the deal of a lifetime, so to speak.”
“I’m not a...a...”
“I think I know the word you’re striving to say, but let’s leave that unspoken. I like to think that what we have here is the perfect arrangement.” He idly traced the contour of her breast and then laughed when she primly pulled away. “Horse, bolting and locking the stable door springs to mind.”
He stood up, pulled the chair over so that they were facing one another and he leant back to hook his arms over the back.
“How can you even begin to tell me that sleeping together is the perfect arrangement?”
“Let’s not forget the perks: happiness, prosperity and moving on lie just round the corner. And, just to throw a little more sweetener into the deal, you move into the cottage, we have our fling, wean ourselves off one another and I sell up when it’s all over and done with.” He allowed the thought to take shape and form: at least when I decide it’s all over and done with...
“You sell up?”
“I can’t see the pull of owning a place when you live on the grounds. Whether you own some of the land or not is a technicality. I imagine we’ll be only too glad to be rid of one another when our time’s up.”
“But I thought you wanted to develop the grounds.”
“Into a luxury hotel complex but, quite honestly, I’m expanding at some speed into the Far East. I could probably do without the hassle of opening something in Cornwall. The money in IT is guaranteed. The money in a hotel complex less so. Originally, it might have been a hobby of sorts, but I’m more than willing to ditch that hobby for, let’s just say, the cause for the greater good.” He shrugged. “At any rate, I have a chain of boutique eco-hotels across Europe. One more hotel might just fall into the category of overkill.”
“How can you be so cold?”
Angelo’s mouth twisted into a smile. Really? How could he be so cold? She was priceless. She had fleeced him and more, yet she had the brazen cheek to talk to him about being cold.
“So, to recap,” he said. “You move into the cottage. I can’t imagine you’ll miss this hell-hole. If you need to lose your deposit, then you’ll be compensated. I will immediately host a party or any number of parties so that your name is circulated. I have some impressive company contacts there as well. A word in the right ear will guarantee business for you.
“My boundary lines are any personal discussion of what happened in the past. We won’t be in the business of post mortems; we’ll be in the business of scratching an itch.” He delivered a wolfish, amused smile that didn’t quite manage to reach his eyes. “You think I’m cold—I’m realistic. It’s been three years and you still went up in flames the second I touched you and it’s the same for me. I don’t want you in my head any more than I suspect you want me in yours and the only way to kill that dead is to get into bed and exhaust whatever nagging remains of passion we have left.”
“And if I don’t go along with that?”
“You will, Rosie. All your boxes have been ticked. You stand to gain a lot. Why wouldn’t you?”
CHAPTER SIX
WHY WOULDN’T SHE? What sort of crazy question was that?
Because there was no way that she would sell herself? No way that she would allow herself to be touched by a man who gave away his hatred for her with every syllable that passed his lips? How could he offer an arrangement of sex without any involvement, without any conversation? How could he think that they could climb into bed and forget everything that had happened between them, pretend that none of it had ever existed?
Rosie wished she had been as coherent then as she was now, three days later. In fact, faced with his outrageous suggestion, she had barely managed to stutter a half-baked, lame and uncertain protest before being left gaping like a stranded gold fish as Angelo had let himself out, leaving her to ponder his proposal.
It was all well and good being clever post-event. Being able to formulate some very articulate rebuttals to his crazy proposition in the quiet of her own house. Unfortunately, she was unable to deliver her scathing, icy speech because he had left the country for business in Singapore. In closing, his text promised that they would talk when he returned to the country.
Rosie had no intention of doing any such thing. However, she did telephone James Foreman, who indeed confirmed that selling the cottage would be a long-winded business entirely dependent on the matter of the boundary lines being sorted. Angelo had not foreseen a circumstance in which the land would have to be legally divided and so had taken no precautions.
“Well.” Rosie inhaled deeply and made her mind up on the spot. “I won’t be selling just at the moment.” Angelo’s brutal summary of her achievements thus far and the promise of a future that was barely better than the present had made her think. She could spend the rest of her days trying hard to set up her own business, fighting competitors with far more experience, possibly investing money to see it go down the pan, or she could turn her back on the bright city lights and take her chances in a much smaller pool. The potential clients might be fewer but so would the competitors.
There was no way that she intended to accept charitable handouts from Angelo in return for sex, but why shouldn’t she do her own canvassing? Why shouldn’t she move into the cottage, get calling cards printed and put leaflets through doors? Maybe get Jack to design a website for her? He was clever at things like that.
Why should she crawl back into the limited space she had erected for herself and not take advantage of a windfall? Amanda would never have left her the cottage unless as some expression of regret for the way things had unfolded and the part she had played in that. James Foreman had said as much and Rosie believed him.
Why should Rosie now just lie back and give up? Why should she think that the only way she might be able to make a go of things would be with Angelo pulling strings on her behalf? Why should she allow him to be the empowering hand inside the puppet?
Three months ago, Rosie would not have considered leaving London, even though Ian was on the scene. She had always assumed that she had bought into the big-city life and there she would remain, struggling to make her way up. Amanda, the friend who had ruined her life, had also perversely now provided her with a choice that could enable her to forge another life for herself. And hadn’t Angelo told her that he would sell up if she lived in the cottage? Of course, at the time, he had been foolish enough to think that the selling up would occur once they had tired of each other.
Rosie smirked when she thought about the insanity of his assumptions! She wondered whether he had thought that she would go along with what he wanted because he had rescued her from Ian. Had it been a quid pro quo situation?
If she moved into the cottage, the whole business of the boundary lines could be dealt with at leisure. It paid to be optimistic. If you looked for problems, you would find them, and she wouldn’t let Angelo scare her away by pointing out everything that could go wrong. She wouldn’t give him that power over her. Nor would she let herself be manoeuvred into a position of sleeping with him. He could be devilishly persuasive and he wouldn’t hesitate to take advantage of the fact that he had done her a favour in getting rid of Ian.
